The first casualty when war comes is truth. Away from the battlefields in the Ukrainian soil, a far more subtle and refined warfare is occurring in the West — the battle of spin and propaganda.
As the war rages on, it is becoming almost impossible to distinguish fact from fiction and to separate emotion from hard facts. Our TVs and social media are flooded with theories ranging from the most absurd to the highly factual. Strangely, with all the technological means at our disposal, this war has shown it is harder to gain true information on what goes on in the battleground and to assess what occurs in the political and geopolitical underground.
That is why this column will not fall prey to the mainstream media’s need for sensationalism and spin at the expense of fact and truth. In this and the next column, we will be helped by Heritage Foundation’s director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, Luke Coffey, an expert in the relations between the United States and the United Kingdom and on the role of NATO and the European Union in transatlantic and Eurasian security, to cut through the fog of disinformation and understand what is going on in Ukraine and how it affects all of us.
“The basic facts of this war are quite simple,” Coffey said for this column. “Russia invaded Ukraine and not the other way around, making Russia the aggressor and Ukraine the victim. In terms of President Zelenskyy, it is quite clear that his bold leadership during this crisis has been nothing but heroic by any reasonable standard.
NATO enlargement is often used as an excuse for Russia, but Moscow’s motivation runs much deeper than NATO adding new members. It is worth pointing out that while three former countries of the USSR joined NATO in 2004, in the past 17 years only four new members have been added to the alliance with the nearest one to Russia located 900 miles away. Putin is an imperial leader and is trying to re-create imperial Russia — not the Soviet Union, moving past his goals of preserving his regime and power and taking a big gamble on Ukraine to build his legacy.
Just as with the NATO expansion justification, many Kremlin officials and apologists refer to Kosovo as a precedent for this aggression. This column felt it appropriate to set the record straight on this issue.
The comparison of Ukraine with Kosovo is erroneous for the very nature of Kosovo’s history and the genocide committed on Albanians living there. A commonly repeated argument states that if only NATO had not intervened in Kosovo, today’s war would not have happened. In addition to the historical circumstances, the native Albanian population in Kosovo and other cultural and traditional reasons that put beyond any reasonable doubt the legitimacy of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, I hoped to bring our readers a more objective, international viewpoint. Luke Coffey expertly delivered.
The most immediate difference between Kosovo and Luhansk and Donetsk, in his view, is that Kosovo’s independence from Serbia resulted from a formal process which originated in the United Nations. In 1999, Kosovo was placed under United Nations administration under the authority of U.N. Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1244, which was passed 14-0 (China abstained) in June 1999. To determine the status of Kosovo, former Finnish President and U.N. Special Envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari proposed a plan of “supervised independence” for Kosovo, but this proposal was rejected by Serbia and Russia. On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Since then, more than 110 countries, including all of Kosovo’s neighbors in the Balkans besides Serbia, have recognized its independence. However, Russia, China, and several EU countries such as Spain, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Cyprus have refused to do so.
In October 2008, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refer the question of the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In July 2010, the ICJ ruled that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was not in violation of international law. This is quite different from recent events in the Donbas. There is no way to prove that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Kosovo would not have sought independence. In fact, considering Russia’s position towards the breakaway region of Moldova called Transnistria, which predates the Kosovo situation, there is a good argument to be made that Moscow would have had designs on Georgia and Ukraine anyway.
As we point out early with the NATO expansion and the Kosovo precedent justifications, it is easy to find ways to validate any aggression. While it may be difficult to distinguish facts from emotion and fake news, it should be quite easy to understand the difference between aggressor and victim.
My advice would be to not believe immediately anything coming out of both the mainstream media and the conspiracy theorists. There are useful idiots on all sides of this war who perpetuate talking points that suits certain agendas, just as there are those who do so on purpose. That is why all we can do is conduct our own research, read credible sources, ask why we are being served specific viewpoints, and above all think logically and critically!
Nikola Kedhi is a Senior Financial Adviser at Deloitte, one of the Big 4 consultancy firms, and a contributor to several media outlets in the U.S. and Europe, including The European Conservative, The American Conservative, the American Mind, The Federalist, CapX, the Mises Institute, il Giornale, and others. Following several years in the consulting and media industries, he has gained considerable expertise in economic, financial and political matters. Kedhi is also an alumnus of Bocconi University. His articles reflect solely his own views. Read Reports by Nikola Kedhi — More Here.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.